The MGNREGA job scheme has helped migrant labourers secure jobs after being forced to leave cities amid the pandemic. However, the scheme still falls short of what is needed in a country with an estimated 100 million migrant workers.
Omkar Rathod was thankful for the company of hundreds of fellow migrant workers as they trudged home to far-flung villages once lockdown had shut Indian industry.
But he didn’t realise he would soon be competing with them for jobs.
Back in his village in northern India since March, Rathod is vying for work under the world’s largest jobs programmes: the only option for the millions of migrant workers who face mass job losses in a struggling economy and a raging pandemic.
“If there were 15 people for a job earlier, now there are 200. Work for eight days is getting done in one day,” Rathod, 45, said from Nawabganj in Uttar Pradesh.
“This scheme is our only hope for work in our village. I got 15 days of work under the job scheme in May but nothing after that,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
More than 82 million of the 98 million people who applied for jobs under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act since April have secured work, a record that tops the number of new jobs created under the programme each year in India.
Source: India Today
